Washington • When Frederick Douglass got home on the evening of Feb. 20, 1895, he was energized. A voluble storyteller prone to imitating his characters, the great man walked through the double doors at Cedar Hill, his elegant hilltop home in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood, bristling to talk about what had just happened to him.
The abolitionist titan had spent hours at a woman's suffrage meeting at a downtown hall. Despite decades of antipathy between Douglass and the group's leaders (he had at a critical moment prioritized the vote for African American men over their push to enfranchise white women; they had responded with an openly racist backlash), he was warmly welcomed.